Chances are, unless you’ve seen an episode or two (or 26) of Friendship is Magic, the words “My Little Pony” will make you instantly think of one of the most terrible and girly children’s shows of all time, the original My Little Pony. Really, this isn’t your fault. Up until last year, I’d say you had every right to despise My Little Pony unless you were a girl under the age of ten. But then Lauren Faust (co-creator of The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends) got her shot at making a new My Little Pony cartoon. Instead of copying the original series, which she has despised her entire life, she decided to make the most kickass girls’ cartoon of all time. Judging from the hordes of “bronies” on sites like Tumblr, 4chan, YouTube, and—well, everywhere, I’d say she succeeded. But let’s compare the original series to Friendship is Magic just to drive the point home.

Instead of copying the original series, which she has despised her entire life,

I’ll begin with the feature that you notice as soon as the show begins. In the original series (from here on I’ll just refer to it as G1, short for Generation One), the characters pretty much just look like horses with slightly smaller heads and stumpier legs and…that’s it. It’s drawn in that incredibly generic, fairly realistic style that just about every cartoon in the 80’s used. The ponies’ color schemes are bland and all of the characters more or less look the same, just with different colors and cutie marks. The biggest problem I noticed is that the ponies are terrible at emoting. Last time I checked, cartoon characters were supposed to be very expressive. For reference, here’s Firefly showing off the only two faces every pony can use.

Because obviously this is a bad thing.

Friendship is Magic (FiM from here on), on the other hand, has a great art style. It’s less realistic and far more stylized and simplified. All of the main characters have defining visual characteristics and good color schemes. It’s still incredibly colorful, sure, but the colors schemes just work. And every single character is fantastic at emoting. For reference, here’s Firefly’s vastly superior FiM counterpart, Rainbow Dash.

Um.I don't think Dash ever had a pre-G4 counterpart.

What characters? Judging from the first episode of G1, there is exactly one character with any semblance of a unique personality (Firefly), and she completely forgets about it within five minutes.

lol no

To make matters worse, this show also suffers from the same problem as the original Transformers cartoon: it throws a huge amount of unoriginal characters in your face at all times to make you buy all of the toys.

Oh, and G4 doesn't?

There’s also a human girl who has no logical reason to be there and adds nothing to the story.

Except, you know, be a role model.

In fact, she has the same “generic polite female character #1025” personality as all of the ponies. If I was a girl, I’d be deeply offended by this show’s lackluster portrayal of women.

This is stupid.

FiM, on the other hand, limits the main cast to six main characters, a few secondary characters, and a handful of episode-specific characters.

Um, do background characters not count? Because there's over eight hundred, iirc.

Every single one has their own unique, fully realized, three-dimensional personality.

Except the males. And Princess Celestia. And Luna. And nearly every secondary character. And actually, probably the main cast too.

Take Pinkie Pie for example. In any other show, Pinkie would be the generic comic relief character, and everyone else would steal her thunder when it was time to get serious. But Pinkie has far more depth than that. Her happy-go-lucky, humor-loving attitude stems from her sad childhood.Her entire family (allegedly) worked on a depressing, colorless rock farm. Once she discovered how good she was at making people smile, she decided to more or less devote the rest of her life to throwing parties and getting everyone to have fun. When her friends decide to miss out on her party in one episode, however, she gets suspicious, then depressed, and then schizophrenic. You’d never see that in an episode of G1.

You must have missed that time someone threatened to cut off Spike's head.

And all six of the main characters have similarly three-dimensional personalities.

And only them.

And all six of them have some kind of mental breakdown over the course of the first season.

And?

WRITING

Again, judging from one episode, G1 is a show about a bunch of characters who can’t accomplish anything by themselves. They have to get help from male characters or random magical objects to save the day.

Just like in FiM.

The villains have terrible motivation,

So did Nightmare Moon.

arbitrarily wanting to kidnap ponies to use as chariot pullers (when the villains already have an army of dragons)

I'm thinking you're running out of points.

and then make the night last forever.

This is where they got the G4 pilot from.

And, as stated earlier, the characters are so homogenous that I didn’t care if anything bad happened to them. And don’t even get me started on the fact that the first episode alone had three bad musical numbers.

Just like in FiM, but with slightly less musical numbers.

And once again, Friendship is Magic outshines the original show in every way. Instead of being a show full of random plot devices, FiM is character-driven.

The EoH is a plot device.Cadance/Candace/whatever is a plot device.

The plots revolve around seeing how the unique personalities of the main characters clash. In the end, there’s always a blunt lesson to be learned about friendship. It sounds corny, and maybe it is to some extent, but I honestly believe that most people could learn a thing or two about how to treat others from this show.

Most of the aesops were eitherA) Glaringly obvious.B) Pointless.C) Contradictory.And no, most people probably couldn't learn a thing or two about how to treat others from this show, because they already know this.

This show about ponies.

REALLY

I could probably talk about the strengths of Friendship is Magic and the weaknesses of Generation One for much longer, but I think now is a good time to wrap things up. The former does everything a cartoon needs to do to be good and then some. The latter is a subpar, unoriginal, cluttered mess of a cartoon that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone of any age.

If it was so bad, then why'd it gain a sizable periphery demographic just like FiM?